“The culprits will not go unpunished. I have been a Military Governor, Petroleum Minister, Military Head of State and headed the Petroleum Trust Fund. Never have I heard of the words “Budget padding”.
President Buhari, February 25, 2016. Abuja. Part one of this series started with the same promise by Buhari to deal with those alleged to have padded the budget; it ended by pointing out to the President how some of those in the innermost corridors of Aso Rock might have contributed to whatever went wrong with the 2016 budget.
The first part also subtly suggested that it might be better for all concerned to just reprimand the “offenders” and drop the matter. Otherwise the President and his government risk serious embarrassment as a result of his insistence on punishing everybody. At this point, it is noteworthy that Buhari had always favoured punishment as the only corrective measure as if every mistake is a crime or act of sabotage that must be severely penalised. Whatever happened to other tried and true methods of correction like reprimand, training, example and even forgiveness? If God himself punishes all human transgressions, it is doubtful if anyone would be alive today. Why should any human being, no matter how highly placed assume that he can set a harsher standard for reforming fellow human beings than Allah? That is a point to ponder by our transient holder of the highest power in the land.
Since this government came into power all we have heard are words like saboteurs, looters, enemies etc who will be severely punished – as if the sole purpose of government is to track down people to be eliminated – rightly or wrongly. That said, readers need to be reminded that since Buhari is hell bent on punishing those who padded the budget, he needs certain facts brought to his attention because, in this matter, as in all the rest, justice must not only be done but must be seen to be done.
No Nigerian should be railroaded into conviction unless the proof of guilt is beyond reasonable doubt. Again, in part one, some doubt had been created by the fact that the Vice-President, on November 6, 2015, while no Minister had been appointed, had announced that the government was working on a budget between N7tn and N8tn. As it turned out, the real budget is N6.03tn.
The V-P had inadvertently set the ball rolling for “budget padding”. When the 2015 budget was about N4tn, and the civil servants knew that the actual was going to be less than that, Osinbajo had mistakenly branded the new government as a potentially profligate one. So, where an official would ordinarily want to request for N100, he raises the request to N120 or N150 – given the expected bonanza. Can anyone blame him? The last time an annual budget was increased by more than twenty five per cent over the previous year’s estimates was when General Gowon had more money than the Federal Government could possibly manage in 1974.
The result was predictable – they wasted and stole a lot of it. That announcement of N7tn-N8tn sent Nigeria back to the dark ages of budgeting. The blunder was compounded with another grave error – the attempt to introduce Zero-Sum Budgeting without service-wide training to ensure that everybody involved knew what was expected of him/her. Nowhere in the world had it been recorded where the switch from conventional budgeting to Zero-Sum had not resulted in a mess the first time out – even when pre-budget training was provided.
The hilarious episodes playing out at the National Assembly, involving Ministers and Agencies are quite common. When Herman Melville, 1819-1891, the author of the great classic, MOBY-DICK, declared that, “There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness is the true method”, he must have had the change from conventional to Zero-Sum in Nigeria in mind. Why am I going to great lengths on this matter? The answer is quite simple.
I was involved in such a switch before; and the errors made by all of us were not made purposefully or to sabotage the company. They were just plain human mistakes which resulted from insufficient familiarity with the new method. The company itself discovered that it was futile to expect people who had spent ten; fifteen or even twenty years operating one method to mentally switch overnight. Nobody was punished. Everybody was herded back to the classrooms and re-trained.
The second year was better; but still not perfect. The question is: why is President Buhari spending valuable time hunting for people to punish when all they might have committed were the same mistakes my colleagues and I did in 1974 in the US and nobody even received a query? Vice-President Osinbajo should not have introduced Zero_Sum budgeting in November 2015 to be applied to the 2016 budget. He should have introduced it for application in preparing the 2017 budget.
Then the Federal government should have undertaken the massive and expensive training programmes to make it work in 2017. Frankly speaking, Buhari would be guilty of gross injustice to punish anybody for this one. I don’t even know who will fall under the hammer; but, I am convinced it will be unmerited punishment. However, if the old General still stubbornly insists on carrying on with this measure, it needs to be pointed out to him that the time made available to each of us is inelastic. God in his infinite mercy has ensured that the president and the pauper have twenty four hours in a day; sixty minutes to the hour and sixty seconds to one minute. Nobody on earth can add one second to the time available to him to undertake his assignments in life. How he prioritises his work will determine the successes or failures attributed to him.
Without ever stepping into the President’s office in Aso Rock, it doesn’t require rocket-science intelligence to know that he would have files filled with proposals to improve the economy, health, education, infrastructure, security, food production, transportation, housing, to fight corruption, to repatriate stolen funds abroad, to improve power and fuel supply, to stop girls from being snatched and to end the Boko Haram insurgency – among others too numerous to list.
He still has several hundreds of key appointments to make and bills to package and send to the NASS etc. At the same time, sooner or later, if it has not been done, he would have deposited on the pile a TOP SECRET file labeled BUDGET PADDING. It is doubtful if Buhari can find up to 10,000 Nigerians who will approve if he opens the Budget Padding file instead of any of power, fuel, forex etc. That brings us to the principle of “first things first”.
Buhari would be best advised to treat that file on Budget Padding with benign neglect – for his own sake and our own. After all, the “padding” had been discovered and, hopefully, removed.
Why not move on to other more important matters – like power, fuel education and information management. The Minister of Power is under attack for power tariff increase; the Minister of State for Petroleum ill-advisedly announced restructuring (was it unbundling?) without consultations and shut down the nation; the Minister of Education sacked, appointed Vice-Chancellors of universities allegedly breaching due process and ignited the protests portending another ASUU strike and the Minister of Information apparently cannot speak without again having to clarify what he said. “Doesn’t anybody on this squad [of Ministers] know how to play this game [i.e governance]”? My apologies to the US manager whose team lost seventeen games in a row in the 1970s. LAI MOHAMMED AGAIN? “We are still faithful to those promises. But, when we were campaigning, the price of crude was $100 per barrel.
Today, it is $30 a barrel..” Minister of “Information”, Lai Mohammed, PUNCH, March 12, 2016, p 14. In two sentences Nigeria’s Minister of Information dropped two figures, $100 and $30. Characteristically, both were wrong – dead wrong.
The campaign promises were made in the third quarter of 2014. By then, the former Minister of Finance, Dr Okonjo-Iweala, had reduced the crude oil benchmark for the 2015 budget to $65 per barrel. At any rate, at no time in 2014 was the price of crude close to $100. That was bad enough. On the day the Minister spoke, the price of crude had climbed to $39 per barrel – even if temporarily. Is this information? God help us.
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